The comparison is silly - dubious as the "eminent domain" doctrine may be, it allows the Government to *buy* your property, not to take it without compensation.
Nonsense. Look at what's been happening to tax havens in recent years: the OECD countries have successfully persuaded/forced them to adopt money laundering rules and loosen confidentiality laws.
You are correct. The French case in question isn't based on European law at all - it's based on a French law which gives consumers the right to copy recordings they have purchased for their private use. This law has no equivalent in most of the rest of Europe, and so the case is entirely irrelevant in most of the rest of Europe.
Even if the decision was based on European law it wouldn't set a precedent for the UK (it might be "persuasive"). And most of Europe operates a civil law system which doesn't recognise the concept of "precedent" in the same way as English or US law.
Also NB the European Convention on Human Rights is nothing to do with the EU - it's a creation of the Council of Europe, which is an entirely separate body (and includes a tonne of other countries, e.g. Russia). The UK could abrogate from the Convention if it wanted to - the controversy is whether the UK is free to overrule particular parts of the Convention, but otherwise remain a party to it.
Why do you think a judge can issue an order authorising a DDOS on grounds of national security? There is no provision in the Computer Misuse Act for such an order to be made, and no other legal authority that could be relied upon.
You and the parent are also assuming that it would be against English law for a person in the UK to hack or DDOS a foreign website. This is not necessarily the case.
Hyping the fear? Have you been living in a cave the past week? London has never seen a terrorist attack with casualties on anything like this scale.
The IRA were a vicious bunch of psychopaths, completely indifferent to human life, but (for political reasons) they never tried to maximise civilian casualties. This is different.
The money in my bank account isn't physically there - does that mean it isn't property?
What about a right to use somebody else's land? It's neither physical nor finite (I could grant the right to as many people as I like). Does that mean you don't think it's property?
No property rights are "inherent" - they are all artificial constructs. Some have been around hundreds of years, others are more recent. But the idea there's something special about intellectual property rights is hard to defend.
(By the way, copyright is not a monopoly right - you're thinking of patents, trademarks and related rights)
Whether you care about a country's legal decisions depends on whether the decisions can be enforced somewhere where you have assets.
So if, say, Google were sued in France and Google has no assets in France then Google can safely ignore the decision provided no non-French court would enforce the decision.
In this case, WhenU is a US company, so where it happens to keep its servers is quite irrelevant - it owes its legal status to US law.
You're forgetting that the voltage is being stepped down. Your household wiring can supply 15A at 110V, i.e. 1.65kW. A transformer which takes the 110V down to 12V could, in the theoretical best case (assuming no losses/impedance/resistance) supply 138A to the PC without exceeding 15A on its inputs. In practice, you won't get anything like this, but 35A won't be a problem.
Google's argument would be that when you access Google Maps you are accepting their terms of use, which are incorporated by means of the link at the bottom of each page. This is probably correct, but their argument would be stronger if you had to view the terms and click on an "I accept these terms" button before you accessed the website.
If you use a third party client to connect to the AOL IM network, on the other hand, you're not seeing any of AOL's terms of use - so how can you be bound by them? As a legal matter, it's fairly clear that you're not. This is why AOL tries to block third party clients technically rather than legally.
"Why do you think Clarence Darrow was interested? Racial and sexual equality were his main fights."
Hello? Clarence Darrow was defending Scopes. What on earth is your point?
"You don't think perhaps the legislators were trying to slowly remove racism, perhaps by first removing it from the biology textbooks?"
Is this a joke? Completely implausible in the context of the time and place.
You continue to abuse logic. There is no logical connection between the truth of a theory and the morals of its propounders.
You make a false dichotomy between religious belief and accepting evolutionary theory. The Pope, the Anglican Church and the majority of other Christian denominations disagree with you.
You snip my criticism of your misunderstanding of the title of The Origin of Species. Nobody who had read the book could have made such a mistake.
Are you a troll, or just regurgitating material third hand?
The Origin of Species hardly mentioned humans at all. The word "races" was used at the time to mean a sub-species of animals. That is the sense in which Darwin used it. The first edition of the book barely mentioned humans at all - later additions contained perhaps half a dozen passing references.
Darwin was undoubtedly a "racist" by modern standards - but by the standards of the time he was fairly enlightened. He was, for example, vehemently opposed to slavery.
The idea that the Scopes trial was about a law opposing racism is hilarious. In case it has escaped your notice, racism and segregation were entrenched in Tennessee at the time and for forty years after (at least). The legislators who passed the Scopes law were the same people who enforced segregation for another forty years. Do you want to guess how many were Christians, and how many "evolutionists"? You may want to look up the "Hamitic hypothesis".
The idea that the roots of racism lie in the theory of evolution is completely ahistorical. But in any case, your logic is faulty. Even if Darwin was an appalling racist and his ideas were supported by racists, this would have no bearing on the evidence for/against evolution. Newton was a nasty piece of work - should I disbelieve gravity?
But I'm sure you're not deliberately lying - presumably you've never read the original sources or studied the period and are just regurgitating what you've read on creationist websites. If you are open-minded, I'd urge you to read these more critically in future.
What A is doing will almost certainly be illegal, as he is procuring that C copies copyrighted material from B, and then that his (A's) computer copies that material from C.
The anonymity may make legal enforcement difficult, but it's unlikely to affect the legal position for A and B. The interesting legal question is to what extent C will be liable if he doesn't know what the content of the packets is. What if C is unwittingly used to proxy child pornography, for example? Is his position any different from an ISP operating a "normal" proxy, which presumably proxy all kinds of nasty stuff?
Economically there is no difference between losing money and not earning money you would otherwise have earned.
If someone steals my car, I have lost $1,000
If someone copies software I've written so I make $2,000 of sales rather than $1,000 of sales then I have lost $1,000.
You may think there's a moral difference between the two situations, but absolutely there's no economic difference. The fact that I haven't lost a "physical" thing is irrelevant.
You are of course correct. Most jurisdictions have general criminal offences of obtaining money or property by fraudulent or deceptive means, and the exact means used are irrelevant.
If the ordinary man in the street wouldn't think it reasonable to know this then a contractual provision penalising someone who doesn't is unlikely to be enforceable in English law.
A clause like that would probably be a "penalty" and therefore unenforceable under English law. In English law you can only recover for your actual loss; a pre-agreed amount is only enforceable if it represents a genuine pre-estimate of the loss. I suspect it would be very difficult, as a legal matter, to show a significant loss.
There may also be a problem with enforceability to the extent you are penalising someone for the actions of a third party; okay the user would have been okay had they kept all their software up-to-date, but is it reasonable to expect the average user to know this?
Slashdot Mirror
The comparison is silly - dubious as the "eminent domain" doctrine may be, it allows the Government to *buy* your property, not to take it without compensation.
Nonsense. Look at what's been happening to tax havens in recent years: the OECD countries have successfully persuaded/forced them to adopt money laundering rules and loosen confidentiality laws.
Damn right.
You get better acting in the average high school play. The script is embarassing. The game requires no skill at all to play.
How can anyone over 12 possibly like this thing?
You are correct. The French case in question isn't based on European law at all - it's based on a French law which gives consumers the right to copy recordings they have purchased for their private use. This law has no equivalent in most of the rest of Europe, and so the case is entirely irrelevant in most of the rest of Europe.
Even if the decision was based on European law it wouldn't set a precedent for the UK (it might be "persuasive"). And most of Europe operates a civil law system which doesn't recognise the concept of "precedent" in the same way as English or US law.
Also NB the European Convention on Human Rights is nothing to do with the EU - it's a creation of the Council of Europe, which is an entirely separate body (and includes a tonne of other countries, e.g. Russia). The UK could abrogate from the Convention if it wanted to - the controversy is whether the UK is free to overrule particular parts of the Convention, but otherwise remain a party to it.
Unless Napoleon won and I didn't notice, no French law is binding elsewhere in Europe.
Why do you think a judge can issue an order authorising a DDOS on grounds of national security? There is no provision in the Computer Misuse Act for such an order to be made, and no other legal authority that could be relied upon.
You and the parent are also assuming that it would be against English law for a person in the UK to hack or DDOS a foreign website. This is not necessarily the case.
Oh please - that's just childish playing with words.
Hyping the fear? Have you been living in a cave the past week? London has never seen a terrorist attack with casualties on anything like this scale.
The IRA were a vicious bunch of psychopaths, completely indifferent to human life, but (for political reasons) they never tried to maximise civilian casualties. This is different.
The money in my bank account isn't physically there - does that mean it isn't property?
What about a right to use somebody else's land? It's neither physical nor finite (I could grant the right to as many people as I like). Does that mean you don't think it's property?
No property rights are "inherent" - they are all artificial constructs. Some have been around hundreds of years, others are more recent. But the idea there's something special about intellectual property rights is hard to defend.
(By the way, copyright is not a monopoly right - you're thinking of patents, trademarks and related rights)
Whether you care about a country's legal decisions depends on whether the decisions can be enforced somewhere where you have assets.
So if, say, Google were sued in France and Google has no assets in France then Google can safely ignore the decision provided no non-French court would enforce the decision.
In this case, WhenU is a US company, so where it happens to keep its servers is quite irrelevant - it owes its legal status to US law.
You're forgetting that the voltage is being stepped down. Your household wiring can supply 15A at 110V, i.e. 1.65kW. A transformer which takes the 110V down to 12V could, in the theoretical best case (assuming no losses/impedance/resistance) supply 138A to the PC without exceeding 15A on its inputs. In practice, you won't get anything like this, but 35A won't be a problem.
Google's argument would be that when you access Google Maps you are accepting their terms of use, which are incorporated by means of the link at the bottom of each page. This is probably correct, but their argument would be stronger if you had to view the terms and click on an "I accept these terms" button before you accessed the website.
If you use a third party client to connect to the AOL IM network, on the other hand, you're not seeing any of AOL's terms of use - so how can you be bound by them? As a legal matter, it's fairly clear that you're not. This is why AOL tries to block third party clients technically rather than legally.
"Why do you think Clarence Darrow was interested? Racial and sexual equality were his main fights."
Hello? Clarence Darrow was defending Scopes. What on earth is your point?
"You don't think perhaps the legislators were trying to slowly remove racism, perhaps by first removing it from the biology textbooks?"
Is this a joke? Completely implausible in the context of the time and place.
You continue to abuse logic. There is no logical connection between the truth of a theory and the morals of its propounders.
You make a false dichotomy between religious belief and accepting evolutionary theory. The Pope, the Anglican Church and the majority of other Christian denominations disagree with you.
You snip my criticism of your misunderstanding of the title of The Origin of Species. Nobody who had read the book could have made such a mistake.
Are you a troll, or just regurgitating material third hand?
Almost all of this is wrong.
The Origin of Species hardly mentioned humans at all. The word "races" was used at the time to mean a sub-species of animals. That is the sense in which Darwin used it. The first edition of the book barely mentioned humans at all - later additions contained perhaps half a dozen passing references.
Darwin was undoubtedly a "racist" by modern standards - but by the standards of the time he was fairly enlightened. He was, for example, vehemently opposed to slavery.
The idea that the Scopes trial was about a law opposing racism is hilarious. In case it has escaped your notice, racism and segregation were entrenched in Tennessee at the time and for forty years after (at least). The legislators who passed the Scopes law were the same people who enforced segregation for another forty years. Do you want to guess how many were Christians, and how many "evolutionists"? You may want to look up the "Hamitic hypothesis".
The idea that the roots of racism lie in the theory of evolution is completely ahistorical. But in any case, your logic is faulty. Even if Darwin was an appalling racist and his ideas were supported by racists, this would have no bearing on the evidence for/against evolution. Newton was a nasty piece of work - should I disbelieve gravity?
But I'm sure you're not deliberately lying - presumably you've never read the original sources or studied the period and are just regurgitating what you've read on creationist websites. If you are open-minded, I'd urge you to read these more critically in future.
yes, apologies, unnecessary use of jargon.
What A is doing will almost certainly be illegal, as he is procuring that C copies copyrighted material from B, and then that his (A's) computer copies that material from C.
The anonymity may make legal enforcement difficult, but it's unlikely to affect the legal position for A and B. The interesting legal question is to what extent C will be liable if he doesn't know what the content of the packets is. What if C is unwittingly used to proxy child pornography, for example? Is his position any different from an ISP operating a "normal" proxy, which presumably proxy all kinds of nasty stuff?
But your argument wasn't that it was the uncertainty that made a difference, but that it was the absence of physical product that made a difference.
Economically there is no difference between losing money and not earning money you would otherwise have earned.
If someone steals my car, I have lost $1,000
If someone copies software I've written so I make $2,000 of sales rather than $1,000 of sales then I have lost $1,000.
You may think there's a moral difference between the two situations, but absolutely there's no economic difference. The fact that I haven't lost a "physical" thing is irrelevant.
You are of course correct. Most jurisdictions have general criminal offences of obtaining money or property by fraudulent or deceptive means, and the exact means used are irrelevant.
Why would anyone buy something that's £250 (almost $500) more expensive than a Mac Mini, and is lacking the style and the compatibility?
If the ordinary man in the street wouldn't think it reasonable to know this then a contractual provision penalising someone who doesn't is unlikely to be enforceable in English law.
When I joined, Telewest sent me an e-mail with a link to Zone Alarm, AVG anti-virus and various anti-spyware utilities.
A clause like that would probably be a "penalty" and therefore unenforceable under English law. In English law you can only recover for your actual loss; a pre-agreed amount is only enforceable if it represents a genuine pre-estimate of the loss. I suspect it would be very difficult, as a legal matter, to show a significant loss.
There may also be a problem with enforceability to the extent you are penalising someone for the actions of a third party; okay the user would have been okay had they kept all their software up-to-date, but is it reasonable to expect the average user to know this?
Adobe is stateside. The US courts will have jurisdiction over its actions, wherever they are committed.
This is a brilliant piece of satire... isn't it?